Omi Arts Center: Mirage Garden, Exhibition, Easton+Combs, Architects

EASTON+COMBS present MIRAGE GARDEN

Gallery Exhibition with Architecture Omi

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Opening Reception: Saturday, December 13, 3-5 PM Free and open to the public, refreshments available.

Ghent, Hudson Valley – Omi International Arts Center will mount a new gallery exhibition of studies and 3D models by the architectural firm EASTON + COMBS entitled MIRAGE GARDEN. The reception will be held on Saturday, December 13 at 3-5 PM and is free and open to the public. The exhibition is curated by Peter Franck, Director of Architecture Omi, a division of Omi’s sculpture park and public programs which facilitates innovative projects exploring the intersection of architecture, art, and landscape.

Headed by Co-Founders and Principal Architects Lonn Combs and Rona Easton, with Michael Stradley on the design team, the exhibition is a precursor to MIRAGE GARDEN, an architectural project formed as a reflective ribbon wall coursing through the landscape. The exhibition at Omi will present some of these early drawings and models of MIRAGE GARDEN, which is intended to explore degrees of the “natural” by intervening at the boundary between the unkempt edge of the forest and the subtly manicured spaces of Omi’s Architecture field.

MIRAGE GARDEN will be created from vacuum-formed black polycarbonate using 3D printing technologies. The ribbon wall would separate the viewer from an interior space, perhaps enclosing a garden or an eco-experiment in contained wilderness. A series of opening in the porous wall would make the interior visible, but inaccessible. Combs describes it as a “boundary condition” similar to the controlled aesthetic of a Japanese or English garden that you are allowed to look at but aren’t allowed to enter.

“We’re excited to explore this as it will be our first traditional experiment using drawing and modeling poised towards the reality of an architectural piece”, said Franck. “The heart of of the Architecture Omi program is to cultivate experimentation and the production of physical installations such as these.”

Nestled within the campus of the Omi sculpture park, Architecture Omi offers a pristine 60 acre site designated expressly to foster and cultivate the production of physical installations such as pavilions, earthworks, landscape interventions, constructed environments. In addition, the program encourages the integration of all varieties of related media, ideas, propositions and theoretical musings in a laboratory-style setting.

The architects see the piece as a vehicle for questioning the relationships of human intervention and isolation in the natural world. “Both visually and ecologically, the Mirage Garden is interested not in purity and preservation, but in distortion and transformation,” according to the project statement.

EASTON+COMBS is an award winning, internationally recognized architectural office focused on innovative building strategies through the convergence of material practice, digital methodology and applied architectural research. Awards include the Architecture League’s ‘League Prize’ in 2008, MoMA’s Young Architecture Program in 2010, and NYS Council on the Arts grant in 2011. The firm received design merit awards from the AIA New York Chapter for 2010, 2011 and 2012. In 2010 the firm was awarded with the ‘highest honor’ in the biannual New Practices New York competition recognizing important emerging practices in New York City.

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Omi International Arts Center seeks to foster an environment of creative exploration and exchange, professional opportunity and exposure, and a stylistically and culturally diverse community for creative artists from around the world. Through our programs and resulting public events – including our Residency Programs, The Fields Sculpture Park, Architecture Omi, and Education Omi – Omi contributes to a vibrant arts culture locally, regionally, and internationally. For more information visit: www.omiartscenter.org